News and Insight for Sales Leaders by Gerhard Gschwandtner

Sales and Marketing

05/27/2015

Today’s post is by Alison Murdock, VP of Marketing at 6sense. Join 6sense at the INMarket conference in San Francisco on July 8 to learn more about innovations for B2B sales and marketing teams. Register here and use code BLOG for a special 25 percent discount.

If you’ve been paying attention to trends in the B2B sales profession for the past few years, you’ve probably noticed the term “buyer’s journey” slowly overtaking what used to be called “the sales cycle.”

That’s not to say the sales cycle no longer exists. But, since B2B buyers have moved online en masse to research offerings and make purchases, the language of the sales profession has shifted to reflect the fact that buyers have taken control of the sales cycle. Salespeople do not control access to information the way they used to. The buyer is now in the driver’s seat. Thus, we now talk about the buyer’s journey – not the sales cycle.

Has this rendered salespeople irrelevant? Much ink has been spilled debating this idea, and many thought leaders, analysts, and experts have cited a single statistic that originated with SiriusDecisions research: 67 percent of the buyer’s journey is now done digitally. Although SiriusDecisions never explicitly announced that salespeople were becoming obsolete (nor was that their underlying intent), many people misinterpreted their research.

How do I know this? I attended the recent SiriusDecisions Summit, where analysts Jennifer Ross and Marisa Kopec discussed results from the firm’s new survey, which was intended to expand on their original findings and clarify their position. Their research reflected responses from 1,000 B2B executives who had been involved in a significant B2B purchase decision within the previous six months. The data represents an estimated half-billion dollars in B2B purchases across North America and Europe.

I outlined six key takeaways from the survey in a separate post (“Yes, Sales Reps Still Matter to B2B Buyers: 6 Takeaways from #SDSummit 2015”). But one of the most interesting points that I want to highlight for sales leaders is that a single buyer’s journey does not exist. According to Ross and Kopec, there are actually three distinct buying scenarios. Here are the characteristics of each one.

Buying Scenario #1: Committee

phased, hierarchical, and tiered

typically involves a six-month sales cycle

purchase price is greater than $500K

Buying Scenario #2: Consensus

team based or cross functional

purchase cycle takes less than six months

purchase price is anywhere from $50K to $500K

Buying Scenario #3: Independent

does not rely on a committee

deals close in days or weeks

transactional in nature

purchase price is around $50K or less

It’s probably easy to see which category your offering falls into, but the further revelations from Ross and Kopec are what is truly interesting: each buying scenario has implications for whether – and when – you should pursue non-human (digital) interactions, or human-to-human (salespeople) interactions. According to their research, as price increases, human interactions become more important.

The implication is clear. Companies need a mix of digital and human interactions with their buyers, and they need to carefully consider which method they deploy based on their typical buying scenario.

Buyers today leave a rich digital footprint of what they want and need. Sales tools have evolved accordingly. Specifically, predictive intelligence tools can help you predict which customers are highly likely to buy; who is in the buying committee; what products they want and need; and when they are likely to buy. In other words, predictive intelligence tells you which of your prospects are “in market” – whatever their buying stage may be. Are they just beginning their research or leaning in to make a purchase in the next 90 days?

These are some fascinating trends and times for B2B. And we’ll be diving right into those at the upcoming INMarket conference, hosted by 6sense, in San Francisco on July 8. Executives from such companies as Box, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Cisco, Xactly, and Forrester will be speaking. We invite you to join us. Register here and use code BLOG for a special 25 percent discount.

Which buyer’s scenario best fits your offering? Share your thoughts in the comments section or tweet using the hashtag #InMarket15.

One of the greatest sales cycles of all time is currently being played out right now, on center stage, for the world to observe. The United States 2016 presidential race has begun! As media coverage heats up, this campaign of more than 18 months affords those of us in the sales profession a chance to see and observe what works and what doesn’t in this most public of contests.

The easiest day of a presidential campaign is the day when he/she announces the bid. It’s downhill from there; the hardest decisions concerning both strategy and tactics are made at the beginning, not the end. Now is when the die is cast! The actions taken and the messaging proclaimed now will constitute irreversible acts.

It’s most important to get out of the gate strong and hit your stride as early as possible. Here are three essentials every salesperson needs for a strong start to his or her sales campaign:

Grab, set, and maintain the dialog.

You want to establish the content of the discussions in your meetings with executives and decision makers. In doing so, you are embedding the buying criteria and setting up others to talk about your stuff. If your vision becomes the talk of the town and resonates with the voters, you are off to a very good start. If they buy the vision, they will buy the visionary behind it; therefore, don’t sell the visionary but always sell the vision!

Define yourself before the competition defines you and define your competitors before they define themselves.

First impressions set in quickly and are very difficult to change later. If the competition defines you before you define yourself, you will be pigeonholed and forced to play defense. If you define both yourself and the competition, however, your competitors will be the ones in a hole and having to spend their energy playing defense while you are playing offense. This allows you to gain more ground and secure your competitive advantage.

Establish your win theme.

What is the one memorable line by which your sales campaign will be known? What both differentiates and distinguishes you from all the other competitors? Pick something catchy that could be plastered on bumper stickers or displayed on billboards. Make sure it resonates with the masses and that people instantly understand it. Think about President Obama’s 2008 campaign slogans: “Hope” and “Change We Can Believe In.”

The candidates that get these three things right out of the gate will have competitive advantage. While the race may be long, and there may be plenty of opportunities to make mistakes, make sure the race is yours to lose by starting off strong.

04/15/2015

Today's guest post is by Joanne Black, America’s leading authority on referral selling and author of NO MORE COLD CALLING™ and Pick Up the Damn Phone!: How People, Not Technology, Seal the Deal. Connect with her at www.NoMoreColdCalling.com or call her at 415.461.8763.

This month I talked to a number of speakers who will deliver presentations at the Sales 2.0 Conference on April 27 and 28 in San Francisco. What did I learn? Here are the five takeaways you need to know if want to create a successful sales future for yourself.

Ever watch a bouncing ball? It goes from one side to another, up and down, and all around. It's tough to follow. That's the digital buyer. These prospects come into the sales process at different stages and go bouncing around, collecting new information and shifting their focus back and forth.

Yet, salespeople are still measured on legacy metrics, as if customers start with zero knowledge of us. Reps are measured on calls made, social touches generated, and emails sent. “But legacy metrics don't work anymore,” says Tiffani Bova, “because the digital buyer is no longer linear.”

Tiffani will discuss other dangers sales organizations face in her presentation, “Who's in Control of the Sales Process? The Customer!”

Takeaway #2 from Matt Heinz:“Sales operations should be a marketing function, not sales.”

When Matt Heinz offered this advice, I thought it was another case of marketing trying to take over sales –- until he pointed out that sales teams boost productivity by better utilizing marketing resources. He explained, “Sales operations has evolved into sales enablement –- which should be handled by a group that can systematize and scale the repeatable tasks that are essential to sales.”

Then salespeople can focus on what they do best: Building one-to-one relationships.

Prospects don't care about you. They don’t want to hear how great your product is or how long you’ve been in business. They're only interested in what you can do for them. Those answers require research and practice.

Patricia Fripp says salespeople should spend at least 30 minutes rehearsing and personalizing every client presentation. “People get cocky,” she told me. “They’ve been selling for years, so they think they can wing it. No way. When all things are equal, your presentation determines whether you win or lose.”

You've already "spent" your commission. Now the customer says he's not moving forward, with you or anyone else. Losing to “no decision” is even more embarrassing than losing to a competitor. You’ve committed to a forecast, and now you have to backpedal with your sales manager.

Michael Nick and Drew Wright will demonstrate the cost of waiting in their breakout session, “Overcoming No Decision.”

Their caution: If you’re hemorrhaging dollars, get out early. If you expect a delay, make a go/no-go decision.

Takeaway #5 from Jamie Shanks, Kurt Shaver, and Anneke Seley: “The most important component of social selling is marketing.” ­

I had serious doubts about this advice from Jamie Shanks. Then he explained how a marketing-driven social media outreach helped him create a referral network of advocates and influencers.

As Jamie said, “LinkedIn is a tool that enables social selling. It’s not social selling. It’s the medium.” Jamie will share his secrets on the “Generating Revenue Using Social Selling” panel, alongside Kurt Shaver and Anneke Seley.

Kurt agrees that marketing should drive social selling. Everyone has to publish content now, including sales. But instead of creating new content, he says salespeople should focus on sharing content from marketing. “Marketing is staffed, trained, and authorized to create content on the company’s behalf.”

Anneke points out that because social selling is new territory, many sales leaders don’t see its value. Without the right motivation and compensation package, reps won’t follow the plan. “Managers will just be adding one more thing to their day,” she explains. “All the training in the world won’t make a difference until their peers start getting results.”

Anneke says to stay for their panel. Cocktails follow.

Thought leaders aren’t supposed to rehash the same old ideas. They’re supposed to add something new to the conversation. I learned tons from these thought leaders, and I look forward to learning more at the Sales 2.0 Conference on April 27-28 in San Francisco. As a guest blogger, I’ll share more words of wisdom throughout the event. Hope to see you there!

The answer is simple: mapping customer journeys. A "customer journey" is the path customers take to learn about, compare, and decide what they want to buy. But neither the sales funnel nor pipeline management actually go away; they just morph into processes that are much more nuanced and customer driven.

Instead of being sales-process forward like the sales funnel – generate a lead, qualify it, propose a deal, negotiate the deal, close –the selling approach needs to be much more tailored to the customer's needs and behaviors. Taking this approach has substantial benefits. Our Sales Growth study, based in part on interviews with more than 100 leading sales organizations and subsequent research on marketing-enabled sales, has shown that a buyer-focused selling approach yields 5–10 percent revenue growth and up to 30 percent improvement in customer loyalty, and it cuts the time from initial lead to deal close by 10–20 percent. How can you uncover needs, however, that aren't obvious? Start asking questions.

How does the customer learn about you?

Who are the influencers they pay attention to, and where are those influencers found (blogs, word of mouth, recommendations or likes on social media, trade shows, etc.)?

How do customers compare your offers and the buying experience to competitive brands' products and services?

How do they decide to buy (or not) from you?

What motivates customers to buy after-market services?

What makes customers want to renew their contracts (or not)?

Based on the answers to these questions, it is vital that the sales team figure out how to better work with marketing to convert and satisfy the customer and win the deal.

Here are three suggestions for surviving and thriving without the sales funnel.

1) Put yourself in your customer's shoes. It sounds so easy, doesn't it? Actually, looking at the world through their customers' eyes is often tough for salespeople. Have the courage to get your customers' unvarnished feedback about what it's like to buy from you – and from your competitors. Ask them where they get their information, whose information they trust, and how well you deliver insight. You might also ask them which of your competitors is really good at selling and find out what they do to leave that impression.

Do this for your top two or three customers to understand how they make buying decisions.

2) Map your own decision journey. For those same two or three customers, map where in the purchase process YOU as a salesperson spend most of your time and effort, and then ask yourself why you get stuck in certain spots. Chances are the answer is a combination of "I've just always done it this way," "It's just the way we sell here," or "I don't know." Now come up with actions you could take to unstick the journey.

For example, if you are always churning proposals but not closing, perhaps you are not proposing the right deals to the right customers with the right information at the right time in their decision process. Perhaps you need to deliver more targeted pitches, with customer data and insight from marketing.

3) Make friends with marketing. Ask for the marketing team's perspective and what could/should be done differently to better meet your customers' needs in their decision journey. Let marketing know where you often get stuck in the process. See what can be done to enable your selling:

Can marketing help build a calculator app for comparing the total cost and benefit of your offering to your competitors'?

Can you get help building the perfect pitch pack, with digital content, for a particular customer you are going after?

Can marketing help build some interactive demos you can use with existing customers to drive awareness of your new product?

08/26/2014

Today's post is by Will Spendlove, vice president of product marketing at InsideView.

Most sales professionals already use customer success stories, albeit informally, to speed up the sales cycle; however, these stories are not often properly leveraged by marketing. In most cases, this is because marketing thinks the sales team doesn’t have time to share such stories, or the company is waiting until clients have spent a few months using the solution or product to see what measurable results can be rolled into a case study.

Formalizing customer success stories is easier than you think, and one reason is that full-page case studies are being phased out in favor of stories that showcase the customer’s journey in stages, from onboarding to renewal and beyond. That means you don’t have to wait as long or put in as much time to include these stories as part of your formal messaging.

At InsideView, we’re mining opportunities to share and leverage customer success snippets at each stage of the sales funnel, every day. We are always on the lookout for happy customers who are already engaging with our sales, customer-success, and account-management teams. Here’s what we pull out at each stage of the customer lifecycle.

Top-of-the-funnel snippets showcase customer quotes or simple metrics to pique interest and drive leads. For example, a stakeholder at “Customer X” gave glowing feedback to his sales rep about his experience with your product at implementation. Use this feedback in top-of-the-funnel conversations, and post them on your Website’s home page.

Middle-of-the-funnelsnippets highlight a customer’s company profile, challenges experienced before implementation, results and metrics after using your product or service, and quotes. For example, “Customer X” had a business review with its customer success manager, and together they identified a couple huge wins over the first few quarters using your product. Use these customer profiles in middle-of-the-funnel conversations, and post them on Web pages strategically.

Bottom-of-the-funnelsnippets are the most in-depth success stories. They dive into product use cases and tell a deeper customer backstory – think video testimonials and prose. For example, “Customer X” now has about a year (or more) of experience with your product. The customer success manager just renewed the account, and your account executive just closed a cross-sale deal. Use this story in bottom-of-the-funnel conversations, and house them in a public success-story directory on your site.

The success-snippet approach allows sales and marketing to work together to tell a piece of the story at each stage of the sales cycle, and it enables the two teams to work together every step of the way toward quota. As the customer grows, the story becomes a little longer and a little richer. It also helps you build a pipeline of happy customers to talk about in the future so you can close more deals.

07/21/2014

Today's post is by Bill Wallace, vice president of Revenue Storm, a global sales consulting and revenue acceleration firm.

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

More than 40 percent of business-to-business (B2B) sales professionals missed quota in 2013, according to research from CSO Insights. The culprit, if you ask sales, is often the quality and volume of leads from marketing. Marketing, on the other hand, blames the sales team for ignoring leads and not working hard or fast enough to close them.

It’s a problem as old as business itself: sales and marketing just can’t seem to get on the same page. Group counseling with human resources, team-building events, and joint meetings have failed to get the two groups to perform seamlessly.

Getting Sales and Marketing on the Same Page

Often, the question then becomes, how can marketing and sales align? This question, however, is flawed. You can’t align the groups to one another; you can align them only to a common go-to-market strategy and sales process. This is the best way to create synergy and value for both departments, as well as for your targeted customers.

Essentially, a go-to-market strategy bridges the gap between the business plan and your chosen markets. It helps define the type of marketing and sales messaging you want to use and answers these strategic questions, among others:

What is the basis of our innovation? Are we going to focus on product, process, or client business impact?

How will clients perceive our value? Do we want to be the low-cost provider, be the total solution, or guarantee business results?

What do we want our brand to stand for? Are we the dependable purchase, the company that fixes operational problems, or advisors on important business issues?

How do we want our sales professionals to perform? Should they be premiere transaction providers, trusted specialists, or political insiders?

This is an intentional approach to crafting how you will execute in the marketplace. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t know the right approach for their business or fail to communicate their chosen approach to the different functional groups. As a result, sales and marketing perform their duties in separate silos. This lack of alignment is expensive and hurts company performance. The resulting organizational drag creates results that are less than optimal, wasted resources and budget, and low morale. If we can reverse this, companies see substantial improvement on important performance metrics: sales cycles are shorter, market-entry costs go down, and the cost of sales is lower.

Once a common go-to-market strategy has been determined, each group needs to understand what success looks like. At this point, marketing activities MUST be aligned with the steps in the sales process. The sales process is the methodology that sales uses to work from an initial prospect meeting through a closed/fulfilled revenue opportunity. Each step in the sales process helps to improve the probability of winning new business – if thoughtfully executed. Marketing should review these steps in order to create key activities that will drive or support each step in the sale. This begins with initial targeting of accounts or key client contacts and continues to fulfillment and measurement of a new opportunity.

To reiterate: first the groups must be aligned to a common go-to-market strategy and then to the steps in the sales process. The next step is to review current marketing activities to determine if they are truly in lockstep with the sales process. Marketing’s effort can shorten sales cycles if it’s designed to bring value to the potential client throughout the buying path.

Aligning sales and marketing to a common go-to-market strategy and ensuring that marketing activities are supportive of each step in the chosen sales process is almost guaranteed to positively increase revenue, win rate, and margin.

This isn’t an easy set of tasks, but it can be done. Decide to end the conflict. Working together is fun; working against each other is misery. The good news is that there is a proven way to end the war, but it requires leadership and a willingness to take the gloves off.

06/23/2014

Today's post is by Bill Wallace, vice president of Revenue Storm, a global sales consulting and revenue acceleration firm.

Why Executive Messaging Fails

Your messaging should capture an executive’s attention within eight seconds. Miss the mark, and you’ve not only wasted the executive’s time but created a negative impression.

Unfortunately, many sales and marketing professionals don’t communicate well at this critical level. Instead of giving executives the information they want, sales and marketing professionals often share what they want executives to know about them.

Executives don’t care about you, your products, or your services. Quit talking about yourself and make the message about them – their wants and needs. Start connecting your messages to the business issues that matter most to executives. Come with insight instead of data.

According to research conducted by SiriusDecisions, executive buyers value business and industry insight four times more than they value traditional product knowledge. Express in clear, measurable terms how you can affect their business or drive revenue, improve margins, gain market share, reduce churn, etc. If you miss this essential component, all of the creative coolness in the world won’t save you. Everything else is just fluff.

How to Fix It

First, you need to determine to whom your messaging should be directed. That sounds easy, but it isn’t. In the world of complex solutions, your messaging should target several people. Multiple decision makers and influencers are involved. An average complex solution could involve six different titles.

Make this your mantra:

Right Target: What titles are commonly involved in making decisions, and who are the key influencers? Each of these titles will have different concerns, and your message should be tailored to accommodate them.

Right Message: Exactly what are you going to say to them? They don’t have time and won’t bother to figure out your intent unless it’s short, sweet, and plays to their interests. Your message needs to communicate what you can do for them, and it needs to be expressed in business language. Industry jargon and tech talk are the kiss of death. Test your message internally with titles similar to your targets. You have one shot. Don’t miss.

Right Media: What form will your message take? While using multiple channels is best, leverage the appropriate media for that buyer profile. Make sure you are being consistent. How many times have you seen messaging sent to the field but undermined by the Website? Your advertising, PR, Website, social media, and sales support materials MUST have the same messaging for the appropriate targets.

Finally, consider the goal of your message. Are you trying to sell something directly to the target? Are you working to open doors? Are you preconditioning? It’s all about mental shelf-space: you need to capture attention and be clear on the intent.

Once you’ve determined the objectives of the messaging, the mantra, “Right Target, Right Message, and Right Media,” is a great way to keep you on the right trajectory and ensure that your messaging hits the mark every time.

03/31/2014

Today's guest post is by Will Spendlove, vice president of product marketing at InsideView Inc.

In product marketing, we spend half of our time thinking over and over again about how we can message our product or solutions to the market. Will our message resonate? Will customers care what we have to say? Will people act after hearing our story? Then we figure out how to deliver these messages and stories in the most compelling ways.

We also hope sales will embrace the message and deliver it to prospects.

Consider the following:

Marketers struggle with being viewed as a cost center or revenue-generating function.

Marketers need to get away from using the word cost. “Cost per lead” should be stated as “investment per lead.”

Marketers are good at measuring activity and bad at measuring outcomes.

But the ultimate partnership is when sales and marketing march side by side, speaking the same language. Here are four ways you can ensure that your sales and marketing teams are doing just that.

1. Make the sales team part of messaging strategy.

Marketing spends weeks and weeks defining corporate and product messaging and positioning strategy. This is often done in the recesses of the marketing organization. Asking your marketing counterparts to include you in the strategy and review cycle will ensure that they are using the words and creating the stories you and your team need to succeed.

2. Ensure marketing rides along with sales.

Invite key-product marketing and corporate marketing members to come along on sales calls and meetings. This will help them understand customer objectives and pain and how salespeople speak to customers. They can then take this back to their teams to build the best messages.

3. Build sales tools together.

Often, the sales team throws requests “over the wall” to marketing (demo scripts, call decks, customer stories, playbooks) and expects a great result. But only by collaborating on the objectives, format, and content will the tools be truly useful. If marketing pushes back, stress that the sales team is the ultimate consumer of the output.

4. Make the chief marketing officer (CMO) your information source.

You have quota and target numbers; why not put marketing on the same path? In his new e-book, Revenue and the CMO: How Marketing Will Impact Revenue Through Big Data & Social Selling, Glen Gow defines the strategic relationship of the CMO and the vice president of sales: “By collecting the information most valuable to sales, and by getting that information to them regularly, CMOs can bridge the gap between creating more sales and building more valuable relationships with buyers. Bridging the two ultimately leads to greater revenue…”

Everyone is in this together, and marketing managers will be much more willing to collaborate if they feel the thrill of hitting a number with the sales team.

How are you working to speak the same language as your marketing counterparts? Share your stories in the comments section below.

02/16/2014

I've seen the future, and I’ve decided to ditch my CRM and get more done.

What's the secret? Contatta. It’s a brand new cloud solution that could have 10 million subscribers within the next five years. I think it’s destined to dwarf salesforce.com’s numbers. Why? Because this software works for the salesperson, not the sales manager.

Here is a little-known fact: the average time a salesperson spends on salesforce.com per day is less than 40 minutes (check Alexa.com for average site visit), which represents only 8.3 percent of a salesperson's day. Contatta is designed to help salespeople work smarter, collaborate better, and leverage social media to the max. It’s like a Swiss Army knife that has everything a salesperson needs to sell like a rock star.

Contatta has been developed and designed by the creator of ACT!, Pat Sullivan, who sold ACT! for $45 million to Symantec in 1993. He then started Saleslogix and grew his second company to more than $100 million and sold it to Sage for $260 million in 2001. He has quietly spent the last few years designing and developing Contatta, which in my opinion will lead to a business three-peat.

Here are just three of the most exciting functionalities, among many others:

1. Contatta turns email into a sales-productivity hub. You don't have to hunt for past emails or spend time searching for files that you know you received but can't locate. You can transfer emails to a workroom, which allows you to work on your projects whenever you choose. No more lost emails or dropped projects.

2. Contatta turns email into a social-media listening post that would make the NSA proud. This clever software not only allows you to see what your prospect has tweeted or posted on Facebook or LinkedIn, but you can see all your salespeople’s connections and leverage the collective social-media power of your entire sales team.

3. Contatta ends email forwarding forever. The sales team can share emails (private or public settings), and anyone from your team can collaborate and add messages, comments, and advice, so your salespeople can tap into the collective intelligence of your organization.

I've had the privilege of interviewing Pat Sullivan, and I’ve edited this half-hour video down to the most essential 3 1/2 minutes.

02/05/2014

Marketing teams today are faced with an increasingly dire problem: there is a fundamental lack of knowledge about who their customer is and what the customer’s needs are. A company’s inability to articulate who will benefit most from its product or service damages its corporate reputation, delays projects, and reduces profitability and productivity.

What is the source of this problem? First of all, the environment in which marketing teams operate has drastically changed. More than half of respondents to a survey sponsored by OneSource in November 2013 said that their company’s marketing strategies have changed “very much” over the past five years. As we begin 2014, we must now assess what processes are in place to help companies efficiently target customers and sell their products or services.

Since the 1980s, CRM technology has enabled companies to easily track business contacts, radicalizing the prospecting process. The drastic increase in the amount of content available for companies to research and prospects to sort through, however, has changed the playing field. According to the survey, the degree of online information available to decision makers has had the greatest impact on marketing departments. A need to aggregate this data has brought CRM shortcomings to the forefront, but they can be rectified through the use of insight from marketing analytics and automation technology.

The survey found that only 31 percent of companies have a unified database for marketing, sales, and CRM relationships, and 26 percent rely on databases that are not connected. We have already seen these numbers begin to rise, and as more companies consider implementing sales-enablement technology, there are several things to keep in mind in order to maximize its use:

Establish where the disconnect lies, and choose a solution that fits your needs. Every business will have different requirements; therefore, when finding a marketing-automation solution that satisfies both sales and marketing challenges, selecting out-of-the-box tools and features might not work for your company. Come up with a specific set of requirements so that you get what you need but don’t overspend on tools that aren’t useful to your business.

Align IT knowledge with marketing insight. Marketing has not always been considered a major revenue driver for organizations. This often prevents marketing and sales departments from implementing the most relevant tools that will help them develop customer understanding. There is data that suggests that, by 2017, chief marketing officers will gain an increased percentage of the purchasing budget and spend more on IT than chief information officers. That means marketing is going to become a greater part of the entire organization, and other departments must tie in closely in order to meet end-to-end goals.

Similarly, align sales and marketing. From the November 2013 survey, 33.5 percent of those surveyed responded that “marketing owns more than 50 percent of the responsibility for getting leads.” In comparison, only 14.2 percent surveyed said that “sales owns 90 percent of the responsibility.” Despite variations across companies, sales and marketing must work together to identify requirements and implement the appropriate tools. Because lead and customer nurturing is becoming more of a shared responsibility, it is essential that goals, processes, and IT purchases are jointly discussed.

Integrate business insight with CRM platforms that facilitate action. Enhance the CRM experience by implementing marketing insight tools that aggregate dynamic data from multiple sources. If a company continues to rely on simple CRM platforms to reach out to new and existing prospects, it could be missing out on opportunities to engage clients on a deeper level by utilizing recent information released by the clients themselves.

Set up real-time triggers that facilitate traction. Including a timely analysis of available live content enables sales teams to quickly apply tangible business insight that can successfully secure timely prospects. Actionable information leads to greater efficiency in prospecting and differentiation from competition.

Don’t forget about social or contributed content. The survey showed that social-networking sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter ranked second to search-engine data when uncovering information on prospects. This underscores the need for sales and marketing teams to be equipped with tools that constantly monitor social data that can be used for prospecting. The majority of the buying process is complete before a salesperson interacts with a client. In order for companies to influence this key time, they must utilize social data plug-ins for marketing automation systems and CRM platforms to engage prospects earlier in the decision-making process.

Stronger customer connections can be achieved through next-generation sales enablement technology that aggregates business insight in an integrative system with CRM. Companies that can quickly adapt to this technology will reduce prospecting inefficiencies through less back-end research. In this manner, marketing departments can play a greater role in facilitating a comprehensive understanding of the customer, ultimately leading to stronger revenue for the business.

How have your marketing strategies changed over time? Do your marketing and sales teams work well together? Share your thoughts in the comments section.